Advice for website selling courses by dates

[saintlade]

Hi guys,

most likely going to develop my own ecommerce site using opencart or the like, I could do with some advice from anybody who has done something similar? I'm familiar with HTML and CSS so happy to do my own design work but need some help thinking about the best way to structuring the ecommerce side of things.

I'm going to be offering outdoor courses, they'll be divided into 4 categories, for instance navigation courses, in each category there will be a number of different courses for instance bronze navigation (1 day), silver navigation (2 day), gold navigation (3 day) and for each course I will be offering a number of dates for instance bronze navigation (1 Jan, 10 Jan) silver navigation (3 Jan - 4 Jan, 12 Jan - 13 Jan) gold navigation (6 Jan - 8 Jan, 15 Jan - 17 Jan).

I'd like to have a homepage, which has links to each of the four categories, each category page will display whatever courses are in that category with a short summary of each course, each course then requires it's own page with full details with the course dates that are running, beside each date on offer details of availability for each date (for instance only 1 place left book now!) and the option to book now, upon booking I'd like for an email receipt to be sent automatically along with the course notes for the relevant course booked.

What I don't want is to have each date for each course to have it's own page, I want each course to have a single page with all the available dates displayed, and the option to book from that one page beside each date. Each course will need a bunch of extra fields containing info such as Price, Location, Max Ratio, Itinerary, Kit List, Previous Experience Needed etc.

In total there'll only be four categories, with around 3/4 courses in each, each course still needs to be displayed even if there are any dates actually available with the option to make an enquiry via a form.

The dates don't necessarily need to be linked to a calender of any sorts, as there won't be a huge number of them (I run all the courses) I could just input them manually under a date option field (similar to a size option if I were selling a product) and add stock according to the number of places available on the course.

The booking form needs to be customisable so I can have some of my own fields in addition to the usual name, address, card payment details such as previous experience climbing, need hire kit? etc. What I would also like is for each customer to have to register as a user of the website, and with that username possibly an extension would be to access a forum on the site for lift sharing, asking questions, and accessing course literature online.

Eventually as touched upon I'd like to extend the website by having a forum that can only be accessed by website users who have registered (and actually paid for a course!) and allowing them access to notes and whatever course they've paid for. I'd also like to offer certain physical products eventually that would be offered on checkout dependent on which course they book, for instance offering compasses and maps if they book on the navigation course.

Has anybody achieved a similar effect; particularly not selling products but booking dates onto courses via any of the ecommerce packages? What is particularly important to me is that it is relatively straightforward for me to do the design work myself, so a package with good documentation so I can reconfigure the store elements to sit as I wish would be good.

Any help or pointers would be kindly appreciated.

[seamus]

I think you might be better looking at zen cart rather than open cart.
zen cart already comes with a function to join a phpbb forum onto the back so that when a customer registers on the site, they automatically get a user account created on the forum aswell.

Setting up the dates for the courses should be easy on pretty much any cart, (open cart, zen cart, prestashop etc) that can be done using the attributes system, which every cart tends to have.

adding extra fields on the signup form will be straight forward aswell, but you will need to get used to phpmyadmin and sql databases as you will need to create the extra database fields to store the extra info, regardless of which cart you use, and join the pages to the database, and retrieve the info from the database and have it display in the customer orders, its a fair amount of work but it isnt that complicated really.

I do think zen cart would be the easier option. At first glances it looks quite complicated but its actually a simpler structure compaired to open cart. The MVC layout (Model View Controller) in open cart can be slightly confusing if you've never worked with it before, as pages are split into three different parts.

You will need to do more work to a zen cart as far as styling is conserned, but it is pretty much easy to make any software look anyway you want, so dont choose the cart software on how it looks straight out of the box, look at functionality first and foremost.

Have a look at zen cart and compare it to open cart, I think it might be less work using a zen cart, and there is a ton of advice on here (I know zen cart inside out)

[saintlade]

Hi Seamus,

thanks for the swift reply and knowledge. From my extremely uninformed and scant research on the net I've seen some queries relating to Zen Cart's security? Any truth in this? Do you need to do any modifications to the package to keep security up to date? Obviously being freeware it does have the drawback there's nobody I can complain to when something goes wrong. My brother does a lot of work with Actinic and has recommended it (particularly for SEO) but I think that's more down to him being familiar with that one package as he hasn't used anything else (he runs a site and warehouse based on Actinic that somebody else set up).

Stu

[seamus]

zen cart security is alot better these days, and to be honest alot of the security issues are peoples own fault, the main one being the failure to rename the admin directory which has been sorted, the install forces you to rename the admin directory which makes it alot harder to find the admin login page unless you know the url.
Alot of the security issues are because of the hosting provider aswell, if they dont have the user permissions set properly, it means that inorder for zen cart to work properly it needs certain files to be writable and if the permissions are wrong, they only way to do that is to set files writable to everyone, there is the main security risk.

If your host does have the user permissions set properly then that isnt an issue at all.

I've build a ton of sites on zen cart and I've never had any problems with security at all

[saintlade]

Cool, was just reading through the Zen Cart security stuff on here and about renaming the admin folder and junking unnecessary folders. Going to download Zencart, have a play with it and see if I can get my head round it. Expect to have a lot of dumb questions on here in the coming week!

[seamus]

its quite easy once you get your head around the file structure